The invention relates to the field of electronic calendars.
Electronic calendars, which may be provided as functions of personal computers, laptop computers, desktop workstations, personal digital assistants, server applications, and the like, have become widely used as a convenient way of keeping track of appointments or meetings. Examples of software program products that provide such functions include Lotus® Notes® and Microsoft® Outlook.
With the agreement of the calendar's user, meetings may be scheduled directly from electronic meeting invitations that arrive in the form of email to add appointment notices to the appropriate pages of the calendar. The recipient of an invitation either accepts the invitation, at which point a notice is added to the recipient's calendar, or declines the invitation.
After invitations have been accepted, unforeseen events sometimes arise that require meetings or appointments to be rescheduled. For example, a user's calendar may have two appointments scheduled: a first meeting from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM, followed immediately by a second meeting from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM. However, the user may be unavoidably detained in the first meeting, so that he or she cannot arrive at the second meeting on-time. In another case, the user may be ill, and therefore unable to keep any of the appointments that he or she has scheduled for the day or for the week. In yet another instance, the user may encounter commuting delays that result in late arrival to the workplace, thereby resulting in delays across the board for all of the day's appointments.
Each of these cases brings the potential for considerable inconvenience. When unforeseen events arise, the user may need to re-enter the calendar to reschedule appointments, or somehow notify other parties to the appointments that the user will not be able to meet the schedule as originally agreed. Thus, there is a need for a convenient way for enabling electronic calendars to accommodate unforeseen events automatically on behalf of the user.